Russian Physicists bring justice for Nikola Tesla

Creeperbane2

Apparently some Russian Physicists have gotten together to make Tesla's dream of free electricity for all a reality! They have launched an Indiegogo campaign to Rebuild Tesla's device for transmiting power through the Ionosphere and the ground and right to your home. Possibly Tesla will finally be vindicated and people will finally realize the evil of Edison. Read more here:
http://www.whydontyoutrythis.com/2014/07/russian-physicists-launch-campaign-to-rebuild-teslas-wardenclyffe-tower-and-power-the-world.html

Thrax

Tesla was a brilliant man, but "free electricity through the ionosphere" is crackpot bullshit.

Winfrey

I'm much more interested in supporting the Potato Salad Kickstarter instead for some reason.

drasnor

We'll also be able to go back to Morse code over HF as the dominant long distance communications medium.

d3k0y

@Winfrey said:
I'm much more interested in supporting the Potato Salad Kickstarter instead for some reason.

I am tempted to drive to C-Bus for this.

AlexDeGruven

Radio frequencies are subject to the inverse square law, IIRC, power transmission has been found to be subject to an inverse cube law. Sure, it's doable, but to produce even remotely usable current at any appreciable distance means MASSIVE amounts of power required at the source, with the vast majority of it being lost to the aether in transmission.

Wires are better.

drasnor

@AlexDeGruven said:
Sure, it's doable, but to produce even remotely usable current at any appreciable distance means MASSIVE amounts of power required at the source, with the vast majority of it being lost to the aether in transmission.

It would not be "lost to the aether". The lost energy would go into energizing the ionosphere; we would get to see some rad aurora and also radio waves would reflect off the ionosphere at much higher frequencies than they do now. The low Earth orbit radiation environment would get a lot worse (no more space station) and satellite communications would be impossible.

Requit

@drasnor said:
It would not be "lost to the aether". The lost energy would go into energizing the ionosphere; we would get to see some rad aurora and also radio waves would reflect off the ionosphere at much higher frequencies than they do now. The low Earth orbit radiation environment would get a lot worse (no more space station) and satellite communications would be impossible.

So this actually got me thinking. Assuming this actually works, and imagining if Tesla got it implemented during his lifetime, would the space race of the 60's have ever happened, or would we have come to the conclusion that space travel is impossible?

drasnor

@Requit said:
So this actually got me thinking. Assuming this actually works, and imagining if Tesla got it implemented during his lifetime, would the space race of the 60's have ever happened, or would we have come to the conclusion that space travel is impossible?

I honestly don't know. Tesla demonstrated this on a small scale and I'm conversant with the physical principles on which it works; the power station acts as an enormous radio transmitter which is powerful enough to induce power into your devices. It's the E-field equivalent of the B-field inductive charger for your portable electronics writ larger.

You can make certain arguments about the electricity consumption at the time to determine what scale they would've needed to implement. It might've been that they didn't actually need the kind of generation you'd need today to make this useful. It's also worth noting that we didn't discover the Van Allen radiation belts until the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, was launched. It was the data from that mission that indicated that there were regions of space that people can only be in for a short time and regions that are relatively benign. The results would've been different if we had gone with Tesla's distribution scheme.